But what should that bedtime be, exactly? A bedtime that’s too early may result in early-morning waking and screwy naps, but a too-late bedtime may make your baby overtired, which can lead to a whole host of sleep woes.

Not to worry, parents – as usual, we have the information you need! We’ve even organized it for you and everything – and we’ve made it printable! Stick this on your baby’s bedroom wall, put a copy in your diaper bag to reference when you’re traveling, hand it out to friends at your morning moms’ group – you get the idea! Scroll down to find out how you can get a printable PDF version of this chart.

Baby and Toddler Bedtimes By Age

Age

Total Sleep

Avg. Wake Time*

Bedtime

Notes

Newborn

15-18 hours

Varies

N/A

Newborns need to eat frequently and will wake round the clock to feed, so a fixed bedtime is obsolete at this age. Watch your baby’s sleep cues closely, and put down for sleep at the first signs of tiredness.

User the later bedtime for younger babies. By 3 or 4 months, you can gradually shift to using the earlier bedtime, as your baby (hopefully!) starts to sleep for one longer stretch at night.

4-8 Months

14-15 hours

Average wake time is 2-3 hours

6-7:30 p.m.

Most babies are ready for a predictable schedule by about 6 months. Regular naps emerge at this time (4 naps at first, and then gradually moves to 3 naps). Use the earlier bedtime during the transition from 4 naps to 3, to ward off over tiredness.

Stick with 2 naps, if possible; most babies aren’t ready to transition to one nap until 15-18 months. If your baby goes through the 12 month nap regression, use the earlier bedtime to make up for lost nap sleep.

15 Months-3 Years

12-14 hours

Average awake time is about 5 hours

6-8 p.m.

Your toddler will transition to needing just one afternoon nap by about 18 months. That nap should be about 2-2.5 hours in length. Use the earlier bedtime during the transition from 2 naps to 1, and during the 18 month and 2 year sleep regressions, to make up for any lost sleep. By 2 years of age, you should start using 7:00 as your earliest bedtime; the 6:00 bedtime is more appropriate for younger toddlers.

3-5 Years

11-13 hours

Average awake time is about 12 hours, if toddler/preschooler is no longer napping

7-8:30 p.m.

Most children give up the afternoon nap at this stage. Substitute an afternoon rest time in for the nap time. Try to time bedtime so that you allow for roughly 12 hours of night sleep, for children who are no longer napping. Use the later bedtime for children who are still transitioning away from the afternoon nap.

*Average Wake Time refers to the amount of time your baby or toddler is able to comfortably stay awake during the day, between naps.

Want to save and print this chart? CLICK HERE for a print-friendly PDF copy!

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Have questions about bedtime, or tips for other parents? Leave them below, and let’s get the conversations started!

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Comments

Christina Norrissays

What about a toddler with sensory processing disorder/possible ASD? She literally has never followed any of these recommendations for bedtimes and will not go to sleep easy at all, bc she has trouble calming her mind down and seems to need to stay awake longer than the times listed. Would someone be able to help me with a schedule?
Its been 2am the past week ?

Hi @Christina Norris, thank you for writing to us, I’m sorry to hear you are struggling with your daughter’s sleep. Yes, children with sensory processing disorders or ASD may need a different approach. We do have an article you may like reading through on how ASD can affect sleep if you are interested: https://www.babysleepsite.com/sleep-training/how-autism-spectrum-disorders-affect-sleep/
If you would like help with tactics and a schedule, we would love to help you. Our sleep consultants are well versed in sleep training and have worked with many families with similar situations to yours. If you are interested in getting a plan you feel comfortable with and that will work (and we will tweak it and work with you on anything that’s not working!) then you can read more about our Personalized Consultations, which I think you would really benefit from, here: https://www.babysleepsite.com/baby-toddler-sleep-consulting-services/
If you have questions about how it all works or what package would be best for your situation, please email us directly anytime at contact@babysleepsite.com and we can help you with the next steps. I hope this helps!

My daughter is 9 months and at daycare she takes one long nap from about 10am-2pm give or take. She then is in bed between 6:30pm and 7pm. We have to get her up at 5:45am to get ready for the day on weekdays. So I have a few dilemma’s here. First I know she is not old enough for one nap, but she will not take a second nap when we get home around 4-4:30pm. I can’t really wait and put her down closer to 5 as she will then be up much later. My question is should she be in bed earlier due to the fact that she is awake from 2pm on and the fact that she has to be up at 5:45am? I am thinking maybe we should be putting her in bed closer to 6 then? It is so confusing and I hate to screw up LO’s schedule but of course with both parents working we need to work it around our schedule. I feel like the one nap has messed up her night sleep. She wakes frequently most nights and needs to be comforted, not hungry or needing a diaper change or anything.

Hi Kristen,
Thank you for your comment on The Baby Sleep Site! I’m sorry to hear that your daycare’s schedule is disrupting your child’s sleep. The majority of 9 month-olds do need those two naps spread out during the day, so even if she’s getting enough day sleep during care, the structure of her sleep may be causing those night wakings, like you mentioned. I’m not a sleep consultant and unfortunately can’t help too much with your questions about how to adjust her schedule, just because they are so specific and she’s so little, but this is definitely something one of the sleep consultants could help with, either with a consultation, or via our Members Area. I do wonder if there’s any way around the one giant midday nap – is your daycare willing to work with you at all, especially since she’s under a year? It’s hard to believe every baby they care for can handle that schedule!

HI. My baby is 4 months. It says that the bed time is 6pm- 7pm. But it’s impossible for because we get home from work at 7:30pm and tje earliest we can put her to bed is 9pm. Does it affect her sleep? She still wakes up many times at night.

Hi Anna,
Thank you for your comment on The Baby Sleep Site! Generally, as long as your baby is getting enough sleep, and the sleep is spaced correctly, you can adjust the schedule forward or back as fits your family. Some babies do better with a later schedule than others, though, so it does depend a little bit on your daughter’s personality 🙂 We have a custom schedule generator that might help you get a sense of what a later bedtime might do to the rest of the schedule here: https://www.babysleepsite.com/baby-toddler-schedule-maker/
I hope it will help!

Wow this site is a great help. I was always following this schedule without even knowing It was recommended! I just created a nap schedule based on her sleep cues

Daniellesays

So glad to hear it’s been helpful for you, Anna! We really appreciate you being a loyal reader!

Julie Hirschfeldsays

My 7-week-old is impossible to put down at night. I have tried starting her bedtime at different times, most recently at 9 pm. I can’t get her down until at least 11:00. Burping her seems to be the hardest part. It takes forever and if I give up on but keep her upright for a little before putting her down, she wakes up spitting up. I don’t remember it being this hard with my first two! I try not to pick her up once she’s down, but if she’s inconsolable I do. She will sometimes take the pacifier and other times spits it out.

@Julie – Thank you for reading and for sharing. Burping and bedtime at this age can be super frustrating! Please be sure to speak with her healthcare provider about potential reflux and different positioning for burping her, which may be more helpful or quicker. An 11pm bedtime is actually not uncommon for this age as a newborn’s “bedtime” generally falls pretty late or closer to the time you or I would go to bed. Read more about their schedules here: https://www.babysleepsite.com/schedules/newborn-sleep-feeding-schedule/ Hang in there, Julie!

My 18 month old wakes up at 5:30am every morning…no matter if she goes to sleep at 6/7/8 5:30am….so obviously I put her to bed on the early side to make up for it, but what is an appropriate nap time? (one nap that last about an hour and a half) all of the toddler schedules I read online are based off babies that start the day at 7am….
Thanks

I try to start calming down my 1 month old around 8pm is that too early? She won’t go to sleep till closer to 11 some days and other days she’s out at 9:30. I don’t understand what else to do. I rock her, bounce her, feed her and change her. Try everything and those days she just won’t go to sleep. Help?

@Valerie – Thank you for stopping by our sleepy little village and for sharing. Babies this age are a little tough to get on an exact schedule or bedtime routine so we can definitely understand your frustration if what you’re doing doesn’t seem to be working. Here’s an article I think you may find useful as it overviews helping your 4 week old to sleep specifically: https://www.babysleepsite.com/how-to-get-my-baby-to-sleep/how-to-get-my-2-3-or-4-week-old-to-sleep/. I hope it helps, Valerie. Hang in there!

@Joycelyn, Thanks for writing! Our samples are definitely not the same for every baby, but they do provide a general guideline of what your baby’s schedule could look like. Here is a link to an article with some tips for early waking (earlier bedtime is one of them): https://www.babysleepsite.com/how-we-sleep/baby-waking-too-early/
Hopefully that will help change things, but give it time and let us know how it turns out! We do offer personalized consulting as we cannot cover every possibility on our site for every child and sometimes you need more information so this is the way we can most efficiently get it to you. 🙂 If you are interested in working with a sleep consultant, please visit our services page here: https://www.babysleepsite.com/baby-toddler-sleep-consulting-services/
I hope this helps!

Hi. My toddler has me so perplexed. She’s an active 2y4m in the head but less so with gross motor. She wakes 7am naps somewhere around 1-3/3:30pm. Bedtime 8pm (lights out) and sleeps around 8:30 but lot of early morning waking and going back to sleep from 4/5am. And lots of yawning all through the day and some cranky behavior. I feel like I’ve tried everything but nothing consistently and I seem to need 5 hours in the evening to fit everything before I. Put her down. She fits seem to be getting her second molar and I see some fussing around that bit she had been like this for months now. What do I. Need to fix? Earlier bedtime takes her forever to fall asleep, the only thing I can’t change is naptime as she goes to Montessori in the morning and comes back around 12:30.

@Tulika Ladsariya, Thank you for writing to us. I am sorry you have been struggling with your daughter’s sleep recently. It sounds like there may be a few factors going on and you would greatly benefit from working with one of our sleep consultants on. They can help create a schedule (that can coordinate with the mandatory 12:30 naptime) that is best for your daughter and can help you handle those early morning stirrings. For more information on what to do next, please contact us directly here: https://www.babysleepsite.com/contact
Hang in there!

She’s pretty much healthy, happy and chipper most of the time. She rarely gets cranky. The primary cue that lets me know she’s close to ready to sleep is she’ll start kneading just below my collar bone area (a habit that harkens back to her nursing days). I guess she does just have a low sleep need, as you put it. I struggled so much in the early days, partly because I kept thinking it was my fault and I must be doing something wrong. Thanks for your interest. It helps to read and talk about it, although I’ve mostly just accepted the situation.

@ Allie – sounds like you’ve taken the right approach to me 🙂 While many parents we work with have higher sleep-needs babies, who tend to get cranky without plenty of sleep, it’s good to remember that sleep needs is a spectrum, and that means there have to be babies at the other end, who really just need less sleep than their peers. Sounds like your daughter may fall into that category!

Of course, if you do have problems down the road, or suspect she really isn’t getting enough sleep, don’t hesitate to contact us for help! 🙂

This all sounds great on paper, but I wish I knew how to do it. Our little one is 2.5 and she sleeps as little as 7 and rarely more than 8.5 hours at a stretch. Usually, she takes one nap of about 2 hours, but sometimes as little as 15-60 minutes. Yesterday, she was up for 16 hours straight and pretty much still going strong. Typically, she’ll go at least 7 hours between sleeps. And this is a big improvement from her younger days! I’m at my wits’ end.

@ Allie – sounds like she a has a fairly low sleep need, although the totals you mention here are lower than the lowest end of the spectrum of sleep needs for a child this age. What’s her disposition like, if I may ask? Does she seem happy and chipper on this amount of sleep? Or is she cranky and fussy? Does she seem healthy and happy?

@ Anna — Yes, that might be a bit on the late side. Then again, some families really prefer a later bedtime, due to scheduling issues that make an early bedtime harder (like one or both parents work and aren’t home until 6:30, for example.) If you like the late bedtime, then you could simply shift the whole schedule forward to accommodate. However, if you want an earlier bedtime, that’s a different story 🙂

As for your other question – the bedtime listed here are when you would have light outs, ideally. The goal would be for your daughter to fall asleep within 15 or 20 minutes of this bedtime. If she sacks out immediately at bedtime, that can actually be a sign that she’s too tired, but if she proceeds to stay up for an hour or more after going down for bed, that can be a sign that you need to adjust her naps.

Does this help? Thanks for commenting, @ Anna!

@ Rachel – yes, all of these assume about 12 hours or so of night sleep. Now, older babies and toddlers are likely to sleep for that full 12 hours, but that won’t necessarily be true for, say, a 4 month old who likely still needs to eat at least once or twice during a 12-hour night. But we usually recommend that when families are creating a schedule, they allow for a 12-hour night. So if you want a later bedtime (maybe 8 p.m.), then allow for an 8 a.m. wake-up time. If you want an earlier bedtime (6 p.m.) then allow for a 6 a.m. wake-up time. This is why we generally don’t recommend regular bedtimes before 6 p.m. – it makes the wake-up SO early!

Of course, special occasions (like holidays, travel, etc.) may mean later bedtimes, but those can be considered exceptions, and it’s fine to have exceptions now and then. And you’re right that during a nap transition, or a sleep regression, or an illness, you may need to use an earlier bedtime if naps aren’t what they should be, or if you’re having more night waking than usual that could result in over tiredness.

My daughter definitely went to one nap before 15 months. I tried for over a week to continue putting her down for the morning nap and she just wouldn’t do it. She went to one nap about 13 or 14 months and slept in a lot in the morning to make up for it. The first 2 weeks or so she woke and ate around 5:30 and slept until 8. This also happened to be the week of daylight savings time so I’m not sure if that made a difference (or messed up the one nap). Now she is taking a solid nap – usually 2 hours. She goes down between 7 and 7:30 but has been waking early about half the time. The last couple of days her wake times were 5:30, 6:00 and 5:45. I’m not sure how to fix the wake time! Before the flip to one nap she usually slept until 6:30 or so (and because her wake times were all over, I got her up by 7 or 7:15 to help keep it consistent) We eat lunch about noon and she goes down about 1:00 which seems to be a great nap time (yesterday 3 hours!) but that makes for a LONG morning. Any suggestions? THANKS!!

Very interesting, thanks! But I did wonder how these bedtimes relate to overall night-time sleep and morning wake-up times? Are you assuming a standard wake-up time here? We often used a pre-6pm bedtime during transitions/regressions etc, but we had to wake our then toddler at 6:30am in order to get off to work/childcare in time. On the other hand I know families who prefer to get up much later and so end up with later bedtimes – as we have done when staying with relatives on holiday.

Thanks for posting this guide! Our 23 month old (who naps about 2 hours a day) is typically asleep for the night by 9:00-9:15, which makes me think we’re keeping her up too long. Hm. Something to look at…

Are the bedtimes listed here supposed to be the time we start bedtime (books, PJ’s, etc) or is it the “lights out, night-night” time? Or the time that the kid is actually asleep?